The National Diversity Coalition’s effort to frame bank deregulation as a boon for minority groups highlights the way that some social justice groups provide cover for a corporate agenda.
Well, for what it's worth, it's almost impossible to find any specific article organically using Google. The only way I can find the news articles that have stuck in my mind over the past decade—crucial, well-reported stories that deserved to go as wide as possible—is to finely angle my search text based on vague memories of the exact language the articles used.
Unlike at Twitter, thanks to courageous Elon, Facebook and Google are completely controlled by Deep State censorship. E. g., FB just silenced Seymour Hirsh
I just now googled “faith Bautista and first republic bank” and you were on the first page of results, in the 6th position at the moment. I tend to use long tail keywords in just about all my searches which blows away most of the chaff. I was searching collateral reporting on her.
Problem is, google is still the search engine almost everyone uses so who the fuck cares which engine I use ;). I don't know why. Hopefully people will keep "googling" things but slowly drift away from their utterly shitty service and "google" elsewhere. Kind of like when I was a kid and we played with "frisbees" but people who actually played Ultimate bought "flying discs" from companies that made them better. We still called 'em frisbees though. Hope springs eternal.
I’m new to your reporting and this one pushed me over the edge from interested reader to paid subscriber. Thank you for bringing much needed clarity and honesty to the grift all around us.
In his book on the 1929 stock market crash J K Galbraith wrote that memory is more important than regulations. If only the regulators could remember the regulations. We used to teach that bank failures unassociated with a recession are usually due to fraud on the part of management. What about fraud on the part of diversity activists?
This entire nation has turned into the big grift. And yet somehow, it's substackers scraping out a meager living scribbling against all the grifting that get accused of grifting by the shitlib establishment. Its getting biblical up in this bitch.
More Astro Turf NGOs. Much harm done in the name of “diversity”. Nothing is what it pretends to be. How long before the Koch allies subvert trans rights issues to their own agenda?
SVB and Signature Bank were deemed systemic so the feds could bailout the wealthy who maintained deposit balances beyond the $250k FDIC limitation. Neither bank, nor First Republic is systemically important. None under $250B is.
Bank asset balances grew (hugely inflated) because of Quantitative Enabling (easing). [About 36% of GDP in zero-interest money at one-time. Unprecedented.] Bloated bank balance sheets due to QE does not make them systemically important. Is a Fed Fail.
Fed didn't need them to be systemically important for the Fed to do their job of supervision. That is always the fail - poor supervision, never a lack of regulation. Stress test didn't even test for increased interest rates. Barr is a bozo.
Finally, Federal Reserve agreed to let inflation run hot for an extended period so as to get even the unemployable a job. It was a social justice agenda made all the more important because QE created a gross wealth inequality. Handing out pennies to the poor, while those closest to the printing press received tons of money for a decade plus.
It is all cover for the abject failures of Greenspan / Bernanke / Yellen / Powell.
I am not just grateful for you outstanding journalism, my faith is restored by the number of people that recognize outstanding reporting. There are so many people that swallow what they are told without the depth. Very happy to be a part of your community.
The author can edit any comment. Just click the edit option on the three dots that appear after reply. I do it often when I discover a typo in something I thought was perfect...lol.
This is correct. I had forgotten there is an app -- never use those things. If you get your note in a browser, the edit option is there. Has saved me many times.
What dreadful decisions from Trump on down. When will people with actual math skills and a firm foundation in economics begin running these institutions? Why have we allowed them to be run by children? With them in charge of the sandbox, we will see more of these failures. Thank you for the report.
Honestly, this is on Obama. He not only gave the banksters a free pass, bonuses and over $10 trillion in bailouts, but also screwed homeowners in the process, over and over. For all the money he threw to the banking system, while refusing to prosecute clear mass frauds, he could've paid off every mortgage in the country and reformed the banking system back to the rules we had during the mid-20th century. Not that Trump isn't an asshole, especially when it comes to neoliberal bullshit scams, but this kind of move was baked into the system when Obama sold out the people for his post-presidential payoffs, which have been in the hundreds of millions. One of the worst presidents in history because he was in power when the banking system was on its knees -- the only time in almost a century they didn't have the power to fight back against real reform and regulation. We've been paying the price since, and the worst is yet to come.
Yes - you said it was baked in. And I get it and appreciate what you said. And I realize with everything Trump was fighting before and during his term as president, such baked in issues were not all addressed. I voted for him twice, so I am not a Trump hater. The piece surprised me
Ah, my apologies -- I read your comment the wrong way. Everyone wants to paint this as Trump's fault, though I don't think Fang is really pushing that line here other than to point out that it happened during Trump's term. Does anyone really think the banks wouldn't have gotten their way under a Hillary Clinton admin? Trust-buster Hilldawg, fierce protector of the working classes and arch-nemesis of banksters everywhere. Hillary? Hilarious.
Exactly! No apologies needed, BTW. We are all in this together and the headwinds are strong as hell out there. With this small army of reporters, we are in the discover, investigate and expose mode. The trials will come later.
You are correct of course. My point was that it was Obama who had the opportunity to actually do something when these criminal kleptocrat banksters were on their knees and instead of chopping off their heads he rewarded them with tens of trillions in taxpayer awards and cemented the financial oligarchy in place, all while letting a huge chunk of the middle class lose their life savings and causing the overall level of employment to drop by around 7% that didn't get close to its pre-crisis level until 2017 or so. Obama had his FDR moment and did the exact opposite -- and I'll add -- the opposite of what he promised to do during his '08 run when he took on supporters like William Black (of S&L crisis prosecutorial fame) to pose as a real reformer only to replace him with perverted whores like Tim Geithner (who waxed on about financial "deepening" a/k/a parasitical finance and "foaming the runways" with US citizens for the sake of the banks). Obama was the biggest fraud of a president in my lifetime and that's saying quite a lot. He mouthed pieties for 8 years while behind the scenes doing the exact opposite. Of course he had lots of help from the FBI and DOJ -- that weasel Eric Holder -- who redefined mortgage fraud so narrowly that the only kind of mortgage fraud they could prosecute was when a consumer lied on their mortgage application. So all the home loan corps and their underwriters at the big banks, who well knew they were giving out mortgages that couldn't be repaid (and securitized and sold them on making money coming and going without taking on the risk of holding a bad mortgage) were framed as poor innocents who got hoodwinked by unscrupulous buyers. How any of these cretins look themselves in the mirror I just don't know. But then again I presume a conscience without evidence.
Yes, many of us felt extremely betrayed. The Obama era, for those who were paying attention and not just dazzled by his political talent and poise, was a fundamental shift in perception as to how corrupt our system had become. It astounded me that, rather than admit Trump's election was a direct reaction to that deep betrayal (and a quite rational 'burn it all down' one for many), the liberal class reacted with Ancien Regime levels of haughty arrogance and disdain. Of course Hillary Clinton encouraged that pose, poisonous viper that she is. Well, I hope they're happy, scrambling around desperately trying to shore up their collapsing regime. I'd say pass the popcorn but for many I know the past 15 years have not been easy so while we may gain some satisfaction from watching the denouement it has the taste of ashes all the same.
"The Federal Reserve last Friday published a sweeping report on the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, tying the meltdown to the push to the 2018 law that exempted the bank from systemically risk designation." Funny how hindsight is 20:20; now if Congress had the balls to pass legislation mandating orange jump suits for the "C" guys when they screw-up and force them to go down with the ship.... we might get somewhere.
Textbook objective reporting we’ll never see in the New York Times--or in Google results.
Great job.
Thank you. It is frustrating that my articles on Substack won't show up in Google News. I hope that changes.
Well, for what it's worth, it's almost impossible to find any specific article organically using Google. The only way I can find the news articles that have stuck in my mind over the past decade—crucial, well-reported stories that deserved to go as wide as possible—is to finely angle my search text based on vague memories of the exact language the articles used.
Unlike at Twitter, thanks to courageous Elon, Facebook and Google are completely controlled by Deep State censorship. E. g., FB just silenced Seymour Hirsh
I just now googled “faith Bautista and first republic bank” and you were on the first page of results, in the 6th position at the moment. I tend to use long tail keywords in just about all my searches which blows away most of the chaff. I was searching collateral reporting on her.
Here is an article about SE optimization for Substack: https://on.substack.com/p/substack-seo-guide
I haven't used google in 15 years. Yandex is great. I used to duckduckgo but they turned to shit during covid.
Problem is, google is still the search engine almost everyone uses so who the fuck cares which engine I use ;). I don't know why. Hopefully people will keep "googling" things but slowly drift away from their utterly shitty service and "google" elsewhere. Kind of like when I was a kid and we played with "frisbees" but people who actually played Ultimate bought "flying discs" from companies that made them better. We still called 'em frisbees though. Hope springs eternal.
F*ck diversity activists. Have a great day everyone!
This would have been WaPo/NYT front page news 20 years ago.
I’m new to your reporting and this one pushed me over the edge from interested reader to paid subscriber. Thank you for bringing much needed clarity and honesty to the grift all around us.
Thank you. It means a lot.
Me too. I don’t have much money to spend on things like this but I felt like I just had to do it.
In his book on the 1929 stock market crash J K Galbraith wrote that memory is more important than regulations. If only the regulators could remember the regulations. We used to teach that bank failures unassociated with a recession are usually due to fraud on the part of management. What about fraud on the part of diversity activists?
This entire nation has turned into the big grift. And yet somehow, it's substackers scraping out a meager living scribbling against all the grifting that get accused of grifting by the shitlib establishment. Its getting biblical up in this bitch.
Another excellent article. Enlightening.
More Astro Turf NGOs. Much harm done in the name of “diversity”. Nothing is what it pretends to be. How long before the Koch allies subvert trans rights issues to their own agenda?
SVB and Signature Bank were deemed systemic so the feds could bailout the wealthy who maintained deposit balances beyond the $250k FDIC limitation. Neither bank, nor First Republic is systemically important. None under $250B is.
Bank asset balances grew (hugely inflated) because of Quantitative Enabling (easing). [About 36% of GDP in zero-interest money at one-time. Unprecedented.] Bloated bank balance sheets due to QE does not make them systemically important. Is a Fed Fail.
Fed didn't need them to be systemically important for the Fed to do their job of supervision. That is always the fail - poor supervision, never a lack of regulation. Stress test didn't even test for increased interest rates. Barr is a bozo.
Finally, Federal Reserve agreed to let inflation run hot for an extended period so as to get even the unemployable a job. It was a social justice agenda made all the more important because QE created a gross wealth inequality. Handing out pennies to the poor, while those closest to the printing press received tons of money for a decade plus.
It is all cover for the abject failures of Greenspan / Bernanke / Yellen / Powell.
Spot on.
Lee Fang
A +++++ reporting!
Amazing excellence in our time - an era of corrupt or at the very least empty minds.
Yes, this kind of reporting will be remembered, unlike the omnipresent stuff that's good only for cleaning the litter box.
I am not just grateful for you outstanding journalism, my faith is restored by the number of people that recognize outstanding reporting. There are so many people that swallow what they are told without the depth. Very happy to be a part of your community.
I don't need to repeat this:
"Get woke, go broke".
$250,000,000,000, is no joke...
Comments section needs an edit button, BTW ...
The author can edit any comment. Just click the edit option on the three dots that appear after reply. I do it often when I discover a typo in something I thought was perfect...lol.
Fantastic! Thank you!
Actually the three options on my screen are: share, hide and delete. No edit ...
Yes, in app
Are you in the app? I think you on,y get an edit option on the browser.
This is correct. I had forgotten there is an app -- never use those things. If you get your note in a browser, the edit option is there. Has saved me many times.
What dreadful decisions from Trump on down. When will people with actual math skills and a firm foundation in economics begin running these institutions? Why have we allowed them to be run by children? With them in charge of the sandbox, we will see more of these failures. Thank you for the report.
Honestly, this is on Obama. He not only gave the banksters a free pass, bonuses and over $10 trillion in bailouts, but also screwed homeowners in the process, over and over. For all the money he threw to the banking system, while refusing to prosecute clear mass frauds, he could've paid off every mortgage in the country and reformed the banking system back to the rules we had during the mid-20th century. Not that Trump isn't an asshole, especially when it comes to neoliberal bullshit scams, but this kind of move was baked into the system when Obama sold out the people for his post-presidential payoffs, which have been in the hundreds of millions. One of the worst presidents in history because he was in power when the banking system was on its knees -- the only time in almost a century they didn't have the power to fight back against real reform and regulation. We've been paying the price since, and the worst is yet to come.
Thank you. The piece cites Trump.
Did you actually read my comment?
Yes - you said it was baked in. And I get it and appreciate what you said. And I realize with everything Trump was fighting before and during his term as president, such baked in issues were not all addressed. I voted for him twice, so I am not a Trump hater. The piece surprised me
Ah, my apologies -- I read your comment the wrong way. Everyone wants to paint this as Trump's fault, though I don't think Fang is really pushing that line here other than to point out that it happened during Trump's term. Does anyone really think the banks wouldn't have gotten their way under a Hillary Clinton admin? Trust-buster Hilldawg, fierce protector of the working classes and arch-nemesis of banksters everywhere. Hillary? Hilarious.
Exactly! No apologies needed, BTW. We are all in this together and the headwinds are strong as hell out there. With this small army of reporters, we are in the discover, investigate and expose mode. The trials will come later.
You are correct of course. My point was that it was Obama who had the opportunity to actually do something when these criminal kleptocrat banksters were on their knees and instead of chopping off their heads he rewarded them with tens of trillions in taxpayer awards and cemented the financial oligarchy in place, all while letting a huge chunk of the middle class lose their life savings and causing the overall level of employment to drop by around 7% that didn't get close to its pre-crisis level until 2017 or so. Obama had his FDR moment and did the exact opposite -- and I'll add -- the opposite of what he promised to do during his '08 run when he took on supporters like William Black (of S&L crisis prosecutorial fame) to pose as a real reformer only to replace him with perverted whores like Tim Geithner (who waxed on about financial "deepening" a/k/a parasitical finance and "foaming the runways" with US citizens for the sake of the banks). Obama was the biggest fraud of a president in my lifetime and that's saying quite a lot. He mouthed pieties for 8 years while behind the scenes doing the exact opposite. Of course he had lots of help from the FBI and DOJ -- that weasel Eric Holder -- who redefined mortgage fraud so narrowly that the only kind of mortgage fraud they could prosecute was when a consumer lied on their mortgage application. So all the home loan corps and their underwriters at the big banks, who well knew they were giving out mortgages that couldn't be repaid (and securitized and sold them on making money coming and going without taking on the risk of holding a bad mortgage) were framed as poor innocents who got hoodwinked by unscrupulous buyers. How any of these cretins look themselves in the mirror I just don't know. But then again I presume a conscience without evidence.
Yes, many of us felt extremely betrayed. The Obama era, for those who were paying attention and not just dazzled by his political talent and poise, was a fundamental shift in perception as to how corrupt our system had become. It astounded me that, rather than admit Trump's election was a direct reaction to that deep betrayal (and a quite rational 'burn it all down' one for many), the liberal class reacted with Ancien Regime levels of haughty arrogance and disdain. Of course Hillary Clinton encouraged that pose, poisonous viper that she is. Well, I hope they're happy, scrambling around desperately trying to shore up their collapsing regime. I'd say pass the popcorn but for many I know the past 15 years have not been easy so while we may gain some satisfaction from watching the denouement it has the taste of ashes all the same.
"The Federal Reserve last Friday published a sweeping report on the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, tying the meltdown to the push to the 2018 law that exempted the bank from systemically risk designation." Funny how hindsight is 20:20; now if Congress had the balls to pass legislation mandating orange jump suits for the "C" guys when they screw-up and force them to go down with the ship.... we might get somewhere.
Congress needs to mandate orange jumpsuits for themselves when they screw up.
Thank you.